mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Ouroboros: Single-step Diffusion Models for Cycle-consistent Forward and Inverse Rendering

arXiv 2508.14461 ↗First posted 20 Aug 2025cs.CVcited by 16

On the map: Diffusion models → 3D, point cloud and scene generation

Abstract (arXiv)

While multi-step diffusion models have advanced both forward and inverse rendering, existing approaches often treat these problems independently, leading to cycle inconsistency and slow inference speed. In this work, we present Ouroboros, a framework composed of two single-step diffusion models that handle forward and inverse rendering with mutual reinforcement. Our approach extends intrinsic decomposition to both indoor and outdoor scenes and introduces a cycle consistency mechanism that ensures coherence between forward and inverse rendering outputs. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse scenes while achieving substantially faster inference speed compared to other diffusion-based methods. We also demonstrate that Ouroboros can transfer to video decomposition in a training-free manner, reducing temporal inconsistency in video sequences while maintaining high-quality per-frame inverse rendering.

Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 71 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2025.

Builds on

71 of 92 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DiffusionRenderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering with Video Diffusion Models30 Jan
  2. 2024Fine-Tuning Image-Conditional Diffusion Models is Easier than You Think17 Sep
  3. 2024StableNormal: Reducing Diffusion Variance for Stable and Sharp Normal24 Jun
  4. 2024Neural Gaffer: Relighting Any Object via Diffusion11 Jun
  5. 2024RGBleftrightarrowX: Image decomposition and synthesis using material- and lighting-aware diffusion models1 May
  6. 2024IntrinsicAnything: Learning Diffusion Priors for Inverse Rendering Under Unknown Illumination17 Apr
  7. 2024DepthFM: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matching20 Mar
  8. 2024GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image18 Mar
  9. 2024LightIt: Illumination Modeling and Control for Diffusion Models15 Mar
  10. 2024DiLightNet: Fine-grained Lighting Control for Diffusion-based Image Generation19 Feb
  11. 2023Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement11 Dec

Other references · 60

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  3. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  4. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
  5. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,137
  6. 2018A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 6,013
  7. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  8. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
  9. 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generationcited by 4,322
  10. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  11. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,611
  12. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,581
38 more
  1. 2022Video Diffusion Modelscited by 2,305
  2. 2019Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfercited by 1,495
  3. 2023IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,464
  4. 2015Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Modelscited by 1,362
  5. 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,351
  6. 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,178
  7. 2020Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understandingcited by 604
  8. 2022Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 489
  9. 2023AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customizationcited by 412
  10. 2023Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusioncited by 320
  11. 2023Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Controlcited by 314
  12. 2024StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generationcited by 247
  13. 2019Inverse Rendering for Complex Indoor Scenes: Shape, Spatially-Varying Lighting and SVBRDF from a Single Imagecited by 203
  14. 2023UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wildcited by 200
  15. 2023MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyondcited by 185
  16. 2023StableVideo: Text-driven Consistency-aware Diffusion Video Editingcited by 183
  17. 2023FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editingcited by 167
  18. 2024Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Predictioncited by 166
  19. 2024ControlNet++: Improving Conditional Controls with Efficient Consistency Feedbackcited by 154
  20. 2023Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generationcited by 147
  21. 2024Infinigen Indoors: Photorealistic Indoor Scenes using Procedural Generationcited by 137
  22. 2021NeRF for Outdoor Scene Relightingcited by 114
  23. 2022DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimationcited by 100
  24. 2023Neural Fields meet Explicit Geometric Representation for Inverse Rendering of Urban Scenescited by 90
  25. 2018InteriorNet: Mega-scale Multi-sensor Photo-realistic Indoor Scenes Datasetcited by 87
  26. 2022Learning-based Inverse Rendering of Complex Indoor Scenes with Differentiable Monte Carlo Raytracingcited by 78
  27. 2020OpenRooms: An End-to-End Open Framework for Photorealistic Indoor Scene Datasetscited by 74
  28. 2024What Matters When Repurposing Diffusion Models for General Dense Perception Tasks?cited by 74
  29. 2024SwitchLight: Co-design of Physics-driven Architecture and Pre-training Framework for Human Portrait Relightingcited by 67
  30. 2022IRISformer: Dense Vision Transformers for Single-Image Inverse Rendering in Indoor Scenescited by 62
  31. 2023Intrinsic Image Decomposition via Ordinal Shadingcited by 53
  32. 2022IntrinsicNeRF: Learning Intrinsic Neural Radiance Fields for Editable Novel View Synthesiscited by 50
  33. 2023Generative Models: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let's Find Out!cited by 50
  34. 2021Self-supervised Outdoor Scene Relightingcited by 48
  35. 2016Deep Shading: Convolutional Neural Networks for Screen-Space Shadingcited by 46
  36. 2023StyleGAN knows Normal, Depth, Albedo, and Morecited by 44
  37. 2024Colorful Diffuse Intrinsic Image Decomposition in the Wildcited by 44
  38. 2024DeferredGS: Decoupled and Editable Gaussian Splatting with Deferred Shadingcited by 41

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  1. 2025Channel-wise Noise Scheduled Diffusion for Inverse Rendering in Indoor Scenes
  2. 2025SRDiffusion: Accelerate Video Diffusion Inference via Sketching-Rendering Cooperation
  3. 2024Uni-Renderer: Unifying Rendering and Inverse Rendering Via Dual Stream Diffusion
  4. 2025Yesnt: Are Diffusion Relighting Models Ready for Capture Stage Compositing? A Hybrid Alternative to Bridge the Gap
  5. 2024Photorealistic Object Insertion with Diffusion-Guided Inverse Rendering
  6. 2025DNF-Intrinsic: Deterministic Noise-Free Diffusion for Indoor Inverse Rendering
  7. 2024Ouroboros3D: Image-to-3D Generation via 3D-aware Recursive Diffusion
  8. 2026RGBX-Next: Towards Realistic Generative Rendering from G-Buffers